Santevia Gives Back - Trip to Thailand!

Santevia founders Yvonne & David Anderson recently visited
two of the Santevia Gives Back locations in Thailand to meet with the amazing
Hill Tribe kids that Santevia sponsors.Santevia
Gives Back assists the Plukit Foundation in providing safe shelter, food,
education and a family structure to many kids who have been abandoned or
orphaned in the Hill Tribe villages. These
tribal communities are very poor and provide limited opportunities for
education. In addition, exploitation is
rampant in these villages, with the sex and drug trades tearing children and
teens away from all that they know, destroying families in the process.

Yvonne and David always look forward to this trip. Here is
Yvonne sharing their experience, in her own words:

"We stopped first in Bangkok to meet the Thai team at Plukit
Transition House. Young adults from the
orphanages who come to Bangkok have two options: take advanced education
(undergraduate university) or acquire job skills. It helps that the Foundation
owns and runs a coffee shop that is managed and staffed by youth who have been
in one of the two orphanages also sponsored by the Plukit Foundation.

The following day we flew to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand for
our next stop: MAKRO (the Thai version of Costco). The house parents and two senior students met
us at MAKRO where Santevia Gives Back filled up the foundation truck with
groceries to stock up the orphanage in Chiang Dao, which is two hours further
north!

Late that afternoon we arrived at the House of Hope
orphanage and had a chance to play soccer with 20 fun kids – who can all play
“football” much better than us. We got a
tour of the grounds to see what has changed since we last were there and were
thrilled to see the new girl’s dorm and the PIGS!

Visiting these projects is inspiring. It makes my heart sing to see these kids grow
and bloom! (Plukit means bloom in Thai)"